There’s a hard sell for recruiters, and it’s known as the “lateral move.”
How can you convince that Sales Manager that this management position would be better for them in the long run, even if it doesn’t have a title that is quite as forthright and may not be 100% sales focused?
Glassdoor and Lisa Alteri, Chief People Officer for Kraft Heinz U.S., has a few ideas. They want candidates to follow their curiosity and be honest about what they want—which is all well and good, but first, as a recruiter, it’s your job to dismantle years of ingrained expectations.
Once you get a psych degree (jokes) and have stopped hyperventilating (probably not a joke), you realize that the key to presenting your “side step” argument is simple. Instead of fighting against the “every job change should be a promotion” fallacy, connect with your candidate on a personal, honest level and appeal to them using logic.
You’re recruiting that position, so you know the company and what they want. Communicate the clear pros to your future placement, and let them know that there is more space to grow in this new role. Who wants to be at the same job for forty and fifty years, doing the same thing every day and watching the minutes tick by?
If your candidate is willing to pivot away from their current area of work, they’re not losing that experience—they’re showing they have a multitude of skills that can be utilized in all aspects of the company, instead of just being the go-to person for one single function. Any person that has ever stepped foot in an Econ class can tell you the importance of “diversifying,” so it’s your duty to pass that message along to your candidate.
Everyone’s career path is different.
Encourage your candidates to take the leap if they truly feel like it would make them a more productive and happy employee. Not all of us are lucky enough to fall into our dream jobs at the start of our adult life, so we shouldn’t hold our candidates to that flawed idea either. The key is to keep finding things that keep you motivated and stave off that Monday monotony.
I’ve seen that concept demonstrated firsthand. Within my own department, we’ve seen major shifts in focus during our personal careers. One of my teammates went from being in the beverage game to slaying the marketing game, one went from hospitality to managing people, and even I went from project planning to recruitment marketing. Those aren’t cons on our resumes—it shows we’ve had pages and pages of experiences and more than a few successes to show for it.
I was kidding about the psych degree, but there really is a benefit to not holding yourself to outdated, traditional career guidelines. We’re all about creating the “new” here at Kinetix—new ways to find passion, new methods of getting our clients’ results, and most importantly, finding new talent to bring to your team. The new doesn’t scare us, and neither does out-of-the-box thinking when it comes to solid solutions or finding the right candidate who is willing to make awesome lateral moves.